(7 of 9)
"There were ten of us at the time—seven brothers, two sisters and myself. I can't really remember much about the happenin'. I was seven. My mother was out doin' the shoppin'. I was sittin' in a neighbor's house, and I seen my older sister being brought inside, and seen that she'd been cryin' and all. That was when we found out that Mother had been shot. And everybody kept tellin' us that she was going to be O.K. Then later the doctor came in and he was tryin' to calm us down, and sayin' that she was dead and gone to heaven and all this here. Just before she died, me daddy had been talkin' to her. He was very upset, he was, though he's fairly settled now. When Mother died, we all found it hard to be close to him. He was always thinkin' of her—that's the way we seen it. I don't mean to criticize him. It's just that we were left aside, like, for a while. That was only a matter of weeks. After that we began to get close again."
Elizabeth sits in the Cross and Passion office where Bernadette was sitting. Her voice is quiet, her smile hesitant. Every feature is gentle—the way the long hair waves; the way the lidded eyes give solace. She may have the face of her mother.
"Did they ever find out who did the shooting?"
"The bullets in her body were from the I.R.A. They've got two fellas in jail for it now. My father works with their fathers in the brewery. He's quite friendly with them, actually. He just has pity for the ones who done it."
The man jailed for the killing of her grandfather was a member of the militant Ulster Volunteer Force.
"And Patrick? How was he killed?"
"It was a Catholic fella. They have him locked up too." All three, then, died in different parts of the violence. "When we were younger we couldn't understand it. We didn't know where to turn or who to blame. We asked the adults, and the adults, they all had different views on it.
"I kept askin': Why is all this happenin' to us?"
"Did it shake your belief in God?"
"Not in God. In man."
She goes on about her life; about cooking and cleaning for her father, about the occasional movie she gets to (Friday the 13th—"a good scare") and the occasional book (Across the Barricades). She suddenly seems invested with an ancient image. She is Ireland, this girl; not Northern Ireland, but the whole strange place, that western chip of Europe stuck out in the Atlantic with no natural resources but its poetic mind and a devouring loneliness. In peacetime that loneliness is desolate but beautiful. In time of war it is merely desolate. Here is Elizabeth at the window watching rain. Or Elizabeth shopping for groceries. Or Elizabeth walking home under that tumultuous blue-black sky. Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream. But thanks to the war, Elizabeth is alone in a different way. She is not dreaming of what she will be. She looks about her and knows quite well what she will be—what her life and that of her children will be in that dread city. And like many Belfast children, she wants out. "Do you think that you could marry a Protestant boy?"